MedSMART
and the Need for a New Training Model
Erosion
of medical skills caused by inadequate refresher training or insufficient
exposure to acute disease is the most frequently documented cause
of adverse medical results in medical facilities without close affiliation
to major medical training centers. Despite continuous growth in
the use of Web-based resources as a platform for continuing medical
education, the static nature of such centers is also their major
drawback in training emergency/trauma medicine skills.
Emergency
and trauma medical practitioners have little time to determine the
nature of the presenting disease, stabilize and manage, and define
the approach. Furthermore, each acute case requires an instantaneous
assembly of anatomical, physiological, and pathological talent into
a coherent clinical picture that serves as the basis for all subsequent
activities. It is a dynamic environment wherein each clinical decision
may affect survival of the patient. The clinician must be continuously
prepared for the sudden emergence of unpredictable events that can
complicate matters even further. An additional difficulty is that
neither emergency nor trauma medicine is the domain of a solitary
practitioner. Instead, both environments require a closely coordinated
interaction of medical teams whose communications and behavioral
skills must be continuously practiced and honed in order to guarantee
positive outcomes.
Clearly,
the old-fashioned didactic tools—books, CD ROMs, or lectures—are
inadequate to provide the required level of training. Even interactive
Web-based training currently fails to offer the solution in these
situations. Why? All of these traditional methods are devoid of
providing the trainee with the real-life stress and urgency of emergency
medicine, nor do they provide the required degree of team training
and interaction that MedSMART offers.
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The way of the future: autostereoscopic
virtual reality simulation
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